Mac OS X 10.7, a.k.a. Lion, is available to download [Updated]

As promised during Apple executives’ earnings call with investors Tuesday, the latest version of Mac OS X has been posted to the Mac App Store. It costs $29.99, and you only need to pay for it it once – you can then install it on all the Macs you own.

This download process is the only way you can get Lion at the moment. Because Snow Leopard, or OS X 10.6, is the only other version of the operating system that supports the Mac App Store, and that means you can’t upgrade to Lion by way of older versions. If you’re running Leopard or Tiger, you’ll have to upgrade to Snow Leopard, then download and install Lion.

Before you do, of course, you’ll want to prepare. See the steps in this Computerworld article, particularly noting the admonition to back up your Mac first.

Lion brings additional multitouch gestures and interface ideas from its mobile operating system, iOS, to the Mac OS. How well these translate to traditional desktops and notebooks that don’t have touchscreens will be interesting.

I’ll be installing OS X Lion this morning on at least one of my Macs, and I’ll provide some screen shots later today in this entry.

Update: I just began the download process. Lion weighs in at 3.74 gigabytes, and the time estimate for uploading has varied between 44 minutes and approximately 90 minutes, but the download is proceeding at a decent clip. I suspect Apple’s servers are getting hammered at the moment.

Update 2.0: It look just under an hour to download Lion, on a 16-megabit-per-second connection. The download drops an installer into your Applications folder and launches it automatically, so you’ll see this screen:

If you don’t want to install it right away, you can close the installer and run it later from within the Applications folder. I’ve opted to extract a copy of the installer according to these instructions and burn a bootable DVD, just in case. You can then boot a Lion-compatible Mac with the DVD and install that way. (Thanks, Jim Thompson!)

Update 3.0: Running the installer lets you first select the drive on which to install Lion. After a minute or so, the computer reboots and the serious work begins.

Update 4.0: After restarting, my MacBook came up to a different startup screen. Gone was the space-themed wallpaper, replaced by a more muted gray background. (Forgive the blurrycam shot; you can’t do screenshots until the OS fully loads.)

When Lion’s desktop came up, I was greeted by a video tutorial that pointed out a change in how you scroll using the trackpad. Scrolling is now reversed from the way it was in previous versions of OS X. Now, when you use the two-finger scroll on a trackpad, a page moves in the direction of your fingers. Swipe down, and the page scrolls down. This takes some getting used to, but it’s the same way scrolling works on an iPhone or iPad. You can change it in the Trackpad preferences pane.

I immediately ran into a glitch. For some reason, the only Web page I could access was Gmail. Everything else, both in Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari browsers, would time out. I could ping websites, but that was it.

On a hunch, I uninstalled the free version of Avast! Home Edition Antivirus for Mac I’d been testing. Sure enough, my Web access was instantly restored.

In the Windows world, you’re supposed to disable or even uninstall security programs like this before you do an in-place upgrade. I guess that’s true for Macs, too!

There was one other small issue: theSnapz Pro software I use for taking screen shots suddenly reported that it was a trial version that had expired. I had to get a new registration code from Ambrosia Software’s site – except, at the time, I couldn’t access the Web to do it! Once my connectivity was restored, I was able to get a new code and register the software.

Here’s the new Mission Control desktop manager running on my MacBook Pro.

I’ll update this post later today with more impressions and, possibly, more warnings.

Oh, one other note: Once Lion is installed, Software Update will have some patches for existing apps, including the iLife and iWork suites.

Dwight Silverman | Techblogger, social media manager

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